


in a bed of apricots

by Chestnut_filly



Series: Actual Fic [14]
Category: Spinning Silver - Naomi Novik
Genre: Aggressively Jewish, Canon Jewish Character, Dry Humping, F/F, Female Jewish Character, First Time, Knishes; shmundies; and dortns ahoy, Post-Canon, Tender Sex, Vaginal Fingering, Verklemptitude
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-19
Updated: 2019-11-19
Packaged: 2021-02-13 03:31:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,349
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21487645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chestnut_filly/pseuds/Chestnut_filly
Summary: And Ruth said: 'Entreat me not to leave thee, and to return from following after thee; for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people; and thy orgasms shall be my orgasms.'
Relationships: Miryem Mandelstam/Wanda Vitkus
Series: Actual Fic [14]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/935439
Comments: 18
Kudos: 38





	in a bed of apricots

**Author's Note:**

> Facts: 
> 
> \- It is a _shanda_ that there is only one other femslash story in this fandom. Obviously Naomi "I want to create women characters who are independent protagonists, and relationships where the woman is allowed to get laid and to love (and to have an orgasm!), and also to continue to place equal value on her own work and her own life" Novik forgets wlw exist, but we don't have to! Let's have a _Spinning Silver_ femslash party!  
\- Wanda is going to make a stellar service top one day.  
\- Y’all will enjoy learning the Yiddish words for the glorious vulva and attendant parts.  
\- Jews are hot, and we look all kinds of ways. The kind of way Miryem looks is not the way all Jews look, or even most Jews, but it is the kind of way that is shorthand for Jewish in the Western imagination, and it’s also the way that is shorthand for ugly, silly, tacky, too-much, undesirable. Nah. Get that white supremacy out of your head and learn to love us in all the ways we are made in the image of the divine.  
\- Jewish cultures have elements of the romantic, sexy, and sensual. Our food, our stories, and our scriptures are a treasure trove of eroticism. Probably a lot of you aren’t too familiar with these aspects, so let me introduce you to some of them.  
\- Miryem is a zaftig goddess for the ages.  
\- If pussy can taste like peaches and cream in your fic, it can taste like hamantaschen in mine. And let’s be real, it does kind of taste like sesame seeds.  
\- This fic was almost named "Be’erah shel Miriam" because I am hilarious. It was also almost named "boi khalah," because I’m _really_ hilarious. WINK. Instead it’s from the Song of Songs, 2:5 (page 57) in the gorgeous Bloch translation, ‘cause you can’t go wrong with that old chestnut for Jewish sexytimes.  
\- There's some creative reinterpretation of the Book of Ruth used knowingly "inaccurately" as metaphor in here. Don't tell me I've mixed it up; just think dreamily about the parallels

❦

Silk will never grow any less surprising to touch. Wanda is used to the practical opulence of good broadcloth by now, the blind face that makes water bead and the weighty warmth of it in a jacket and skirt. She has linen underclothes now too, after a lifetime of hemp, which make her feel like a birch tree in the summer, delicate and breezy and cool. Silk, though. 

Wanda rubs the edge of Miryem’s skirt between her fingertips. It’s so soft she almost has to convince herself she is feeling anything at all, like laying her hands just on top of a still eddy in a creek. Each patch warms up to blood temperature in an instant and is cool again the moment her hands leave it. Her calluses catch on the weave, so she switches to petting the fabric with her knuckles. Silk is worse than useless on a farm, even the evidence of hard work enough to snag it. So, the blue dress lying on the felted blanket. So, Miryem in the corner of the farmhouse’s second bedroom, her back to Wanda, struggling to close the buttons on her bodice. 

Wanda’s bodice. The bodice that was once Miryem’s but which she left behind to go live with her ice king, and which Wanda took and took in to make a short jacket for herself, because though Miryem is half a head smaller and far narrower through the shoulders, she is apparently much more buxom. She had not thought through the consequences of that observation before now. Watching Miryem pull the sides of the bodice-turned-jacket closer together, it seems quite evident. Perhaps, she considers, it is simply that she hasn’t seen Miryem like this before, in the pinfeather stage between queen of the Staryk and her mother’s Miryeleh, coming back to the house of her parents to help with the harvest after the first frost. It’s been a spring and summer since Wanda saw her last, driving into the distance with the last snow and her fairy king, and she finds herself piecing a picture of Miryem back together from what she remembers, and what she dreamed, and what must be new. The bosom might be new. Miryem and Wanda both are eating better than they once did. Her cheeks, too, look fuller, curved like the broad crescents of hip beneath Miryem’s own fine linen shift.

Miryem tsks exasperatedly, jolting Wanda out of her musings. She turns back around, apparently deciding irritation warrants discarding the privacy of her corner. 

“Did you alter this to be smaller?” she asks. “I thought you were so much larger than I am.” 

Wanda hesitates. Despite-- well. Despite soldiers in the snow, and prayers over seeds, and Miryem leaving her to guard her family in the summer months, a certain tone of Miryem’s voice makes her think back to those first days, Miryem’s eyes on her as she ate, Miryem checking the quality of her housework. 

“Only in the shoulders and my height, I think,” Wanda replies, after a pause. “You-- are fuller than I am.” 

Miryem looks taken aback for a moment, then smiles. “That’s it! Yes, you put in these darts. The stitching is good work,” she says, examining the bodice more closely, and this time her voice reminds Wanda of learning her letters, Miryem’s quiet, hard-earned praise. It came easier, this time. Just as Wanda’s voice came easier, just as the presumption of taking a bodice that was once Miryem’s to alter into something for her own use came easy, a month or two ago. 

Miryem sighs. “I think I just won’t fit into this now,” she says, and pulls the edges of the bodice together once more, trying to make them meet in the middle. Her shift has a square neck. The tops of her breasts mound like the braided Shabbos bread her mother makes when the tension of the jacket pushes them up. Wanda looks away. 

Her mother’s body is too painful to think of. She has no sisters. Is this what it would have been like to see the bodies of other women casually, warmly, in a nice room with heavy blankets, every day? She thinks likely not. She has seen her brother’s bodies since they were babies, and soldiers’ bodies, and her father’s hateful, stinking body, and even Panov Mandelstam’s torso out in the fields. Each has provoked a range of emotions in her, amusement or hatefulness or tenderness or simple surprise, but none this-- shiver. Like the silk sparking against the woolen blanket as Miryem threw it down. 

“Wanda?” 

She jerks her eyes up. Miryem looks at her, steady. “Is something wrong?” 

Wanda feels like Miryem’s subjects feel, perhaps, when they come before her with a complaint, something niggling and annoying that the queen can see, then fix by virtue of being the queen. 

“Who makes your clothes, in your kingdom?” Wanda asks. She wants to know if someone pinned the silk on the bed in neat rows down Miryem’s back, who does the fine work on the hems and necks of the queen’s shifts, for only Miryem and her tall Staryk king to see. 

Miryem smiles. “Flek.” 

Wanda doesn’t know what she means. “A stain? Spots?” 

It has been difficult to pick up the bits of the Mandelstams’ strange Western language, the one that isn’t the language they pray in. This might be another failure of understanding on her part. 

“My bondswoman,” Miryem says, with a depth of feeling that Wanda has never associated with that word before. “My first friend there” --Wanda has no need to ask where-- “who helped me and took a great risk to be kind to me although she didn’t have to.” 

A little smile flickers on her lips, tiny and warm like the Mandelstams’ candle flames, a smile Wanda hasn’t seen her give before. She feels a twist inside, like hunger -- she likes that smile, but who’s this _Flek_? So much of her time with Miryem has been spent, one way or another, in shared desperation. What did Flek do to give Miryem that smile? Then Miryem turns that smile on her, and Wanda is just glad to see it, glad to feel her own lips curving up in a little smile of her own. 

“She has a daughter,” Miryem says. “She reminds me of you and your brothers. I suppose you might call her daughter my goddaughter -- I gave her a name. It’s like another little family. She takes care of it there, and you take care of my family here.”

Wanda feels her little smile getting wider, pulling at her cheeks and crinkling her eyes and showing her teeth, a candle flame herself, a feeling that she is still unused to. She holds out her hands for Miryem to take because yes, they’re family. And Wanda has felt strange, these last months of summer with Miryem locked away awaiting the first frost, eating breakfast with Panova Mandelstam and wearing Miryem’s old clothes and sleeping in a room with another bed waiting, like another daughter of the house. But it’s fine, better than fine, because here is Miryem, and here is Wanda, and they can smile at each other like they never were hungry together, or terrified together, never almost brought the world to ruin together. 

Miryem takes her hands. They’re so large in Miryem’s grasp, calloused and with a little burn on one finger from a spitting pan two mornings ago. She is looking down at her hands as Miryem lifts them for her, brings them up to rest on Miryem’s collarbones. Wanda’s hands still look so pale against the lovely beech of her skin. Her fingertips itch.

“I’ve told her daughter stories about you. She thinks you’re so brave, and quite special, though I believe she may be tiring of the story of your saving her king. She hears it often enough -- I think of you all the time,” Miryem says, still smiling her little smile, and Wanda imagines her in her brocade and her gold and her crown, thinking of the rough-handed farmgirl who cares for her family, and feels like a baked apple, all spices and sweetness and warm down to the core. 

“I think of you, too. All the time.” 

Miryem’s eyes crinkle more, and Wanda wants to look at the way her smile creases her face, but her gaze is drawn down, helplessly, to her hands above Miryem’s bosom, then back to her lips, her dark mass of hair, then down again. 

“Remeasuring your jacket?” 

Wanda startles, blushes, moves to take her hands back, but Miryem moves with her, grasps her fingers more tightly, takes an extra step in. “I don’t mind.” 

That mustn’t- A sort of knowledge tingles through Wanda’s spine, but- “Mind what?”

In lieu of an answer, Miryem lifts her fingers, her long, knobby-knuckled, calloused fingers, to her lips and kisses them. Middle finger, ring finger, middle knuckles, back of the palm, a long drag back to the fingertips. Like the silk caught on Wanda’s hands, Miryem’s plum-colored lips catch on the wrinkles and roughnesses and little muscles on her fingertips. Wanda can’t _think_. 

Her lips part on a little sigh, and Miryem smiles, and Wanda feels it against the creases between her fingers. She shuts her eyes as tight as she can. “Wait!” 

Miryem stops at once. Before she can say anything, Wanda blurts out, “The Staryk?” 

Fairy or not, mustn’t her wedding vows mean that all this, this kissing of hands, is forbidden? Or do the winter folk do things so differently? Or, terrible thought, is Miryem so unhappy? Wanda opens her eyes just a sliver, just enough to gauge Miryem’s reaction to her importuning scruples, to see if she is angry, or sad, or hurt, or will go away back to her winter palace for good.

She’s looking back at Wanda steadily. Wanda’s hands are still in hers, now gripped firmly as one would hold a restless hen. “It is well,” she says. “My husband needs an heir we can’t make together, and I need a kind of warmth he can’t give me. We are very content, the two of us, and this,” she squeezes Wanda’s hands gently, “is only more contentment for everyone.”

Through her still-slitted eyes, Wanda sees Miryem’s mouth quirk. “Really, it’s much fairer for the two of us to diversify; it’s easier to manage our expectations that way.”

That, more than anything, stills the rabbiting quiver. Miryem sounds as if she is discussing the refinancing of a loan to the cheesemaker, even when her breath rustles the little hairs on Wanda’s hands. 

“Is that… right?” Wanda can’t help but ask. Almost nothing the sour-faced priests in town told her on her family’s rare visits to church has struck her as true, particularly since the Mandelstams took her in, but this still sounds-- Well, like nothing Wanda has dared dream of before. At least, not the kind of dream she thinks about in the morning. Perhaps the kind of dream where she bundles up her blankets and rocks against them in the dark, in her new, empty room with the new, empty bed in the alcove across from her, waiting for its occupant to come back.

Miryem is still smiling. “If the patriarchs did it, why shouldn’t I? My husband is my Boaz--ha! of a sort, at least-- and you,” she says, as she moves closer to Wanda, who feels the hairs rise on her arms, again, the silk throwing sparks off the wool, “You’re my Ruth.” 

Miryem’s eyes are dark, and though she must tilt her chin up at a sharp angle to meet Wanda’s gaze from so close, Wanda feels enveloped, small. Not small as she once did in her father’s house, but small like Miryem might reach, and find her anywhere. She thinks of that pretty story, which Panova Mandelstam told her when she struggled with learning the strange sounds of their language and balked at the thought of going into the city and taking up food and space and attention without Miryem there, how it made her feel a part of a family much greater than even the woods. 

“My Ruth,” Miryem says again, and this time her tone makes Wanda think of those times near the beginning of everything when Miryem had done something she thought she could not do, spoken to an intimidating client or gotten an extra cheese out of someone, or closed a troublesome account for good, a kind of low, firm exultation, like everything was right in the world and Miryem herself had put it that way. “So I’m Naomi, who was bitter.” 

She smiles, and Wanda feels her head almost spin like a wedding dance at the joy in it. She tightens her grip on Miryem’s hands.

“Not anymore,” she says, not a question, thrilling to be certain and to be able to speak that certainty. 

“Not anymore,” Miryem echoes, and smiling, sways closer. “With my Boaz and my Ruth, I’m as sweet as my grandmother’s cheesecake. Will you kiss me?”

“Yes,” Wanda breathes, and does. 

Miryem is so small despite her presence. Wanda must duck her head, take Miryem’s face in her palms to tilt her mouth up. For all her talk of sweetness, her lips taste faintly salty. Wanda presses and presses their mouths together, marveling, discovering that she can breathe through her nose, a great, sparking prickle turning her whole body into a lantern, light shimmering and flaring at each little shift of Miryem’s hands and lips and body. 

Kissing is wet, she finds. They move their lips together, and the soft insides rub gently over one another and leave wetness behind, until the friction is less a press than a skid, and then a slide, and Wanda pushes harder and harder, remembering periodically to breathe, that lantern glow sparking in a different place each time Miryem moves. Wanda’s hands slide from Miryem’s cheeks to her jaw to her shoulders down to her waist, the small of her back, between her shoulder blades, clutching her tighter and tighter. Miryem cleaves right back, although it makes her tilt her head back yet farther, and her full breasts press against Wanda’s ribs, and the lushness of her stomach presses against the little swell of _ enough_ness that Wanda has developed during this long, fruit-filled, grain-filled summer, and Wanda wants to consume her, like the awful fire demon, because she is so soft, and so small in her arms, and she tastes salty, and Wanda thinks that if they stop kissing she would never feel satisfied again. 

Miryem scrabbles around at her arms until she finds Wanda’s hands yet again, and drags them up her front to her breasts. Wanda forgets to keep kissing. 

“Oh,” she says. Miryem’s breasts under her shift are as soft as summer cherries left long on the tree, her nipples firm like their little pits. Wanda pulls away to look down at her hands, watches as if from somehow outside herself as she cups and lifts her breasts, how Miryem overflows her long, rough hands. “_Oh_,” she says again, and shoves her face right between Miryem’s gorgeous, gorgeous breasts. 

There’s a beat. Wanda cringes internally, considers withdrawing her nose from Miryem’s cleavage and stammering an apology, but then Miryem embraces her head with her forearms as best she can and starts to laugh. Her ribs shake and her arms rock Wanda’s head back and forth slightly and her breasts, well, they jiggle like barely-set soured cream, and then Wanda is laughing too. She nuzzles deeper and rubs her head between them, where she smells like clean linen and the hard lye soap the family mills themselves, and when she finally can’t stay half-crouched anymore, she straightens up with a silly grin, hands still firmly in place. 

“Having fun?” Miryem asks, and Wanda thrills at the complete absence of her usual dryness. 

“You’re so beautiful,” she manages to get out, and then she has to kiss Miryem again, trailing from her lips into the beautiful clouds of sissel-dark hair curling over her ears and neck. The all-over lantern glow of their first kiss is settling in, localizing. Her belly throbs, her that-place between her legs throbs, her lips tingle. She squeezes the tips of Miryem’s breasts like she has done to herself alone in the dark, and Miryem makes a low noise like purring that Wanda feels in her _ fingernails_. 

“Can I see you?” 

It takes her a moment to realize that Miryem is tugging at her blouse. Miryem wants to see her. 

“I- yes, yes, you can.” Her blouse is tucked into her skirt. She’s wearing her _ apron_. She’d been fully dressed before she came in to see what was taking Miryem so long. It seems so completely absurd to be covered in layers of broadcloth and linen when Miryem’s nipples are showing through her shift. Taking a step back, she yanks at the ties of her apron and skirt, leaves them crumpled on the floor, tugs her shirt off over her head without undoing the last two buttons and gets stuck half-out of her long shift, clumsy with wanting to be as close to Miryem as she possibly can be.

Miryem’s little hands slide up her ribs under the half-off shift, skirting just around Wanda’s own breasts and pushing the shift the rest of the way over Wanda’s head even as Wanda squeaks. Freed from the linen, she can see Miryem’s mouth slightly open and her dark eyes darker even than charcoal, sweeping up and down Wanda’s body. 

She lifts her eyes to Wanda’s, as if asking her to say no, and brings her hands up to Wanda’s own small breasts with their nipples pointing slightly out towards her arms, and then she has to close them as Miryem rolls her palms up, dragging against the skin. 

“Pretty,” Miryem says, and Wanda feels delicious, feels like the handsomest apple of the bunch in her pale body with its broad shoulders and long waist and lanky limbs, layered over for the first time in her life with long muscles and soft fat. Miryem leans down to take her nipple in her mouth, and it’s like she’s tugging on some harp string resonating through her belly and between her legs and right down to her knees, which wobble like some knock-legged baby goat’s, so Miryem laughs again and gives her a little push towards the bed, her bed, which has been waiting across the room from Wanda all season, this unimaginable luxury a scant pace away from where Wanda lay and wondered and explored in the dark. She sits down when the backs of her knees hit the ticking. Miryem climbs on top of her, yanking her shift off over her head and letting the fine linen and its fine embroidery tangle with Wanda’s altered jacket on the floor.

They kiss again and keep kissing. Miryem bites Wanda’s lip, and the cherry-tart zip of it is amazing, then Wanda grips Miryem’s wonderful soft hips hard enough to find the bone underneath and yanks her closer, and that’s better, and Wanda threads her hands through Miryem’s curls and thinks all of this is the best of all, and then Miryem runs a hand shiveringly down Wanda’s ribs the crease of her hip and rests it right at the top of her thigh and asks, “Can I touch you?” 

Somewhat begrudgingly, Wanda surfaces from her haze of superlative feelings. “You are touching me.” 

Miryem rolls her eyes and pushes Wanda onto her back. “No, your knish; can I put my fingers in your knish?”

Panova Mandelstam’s potato dumplings swim into Wanda’s mind’s eye. They do have that-- well, and they are warm-- “Is that what you call your…” 

“Well,” and Miryem actually looks rather embarrassed, and Wanda wants to kiss her, potatoes or not, “My mother calls it ‘shmundie,’ but that just makes me think of being a little girl, and, well, I heard my cousin Zhores use it once, and they are all soft, you know, and warm and just nice. What do _ you _ call yours?” 

“Just… you’d say ‘dortn?’ That there?” Wanda would very much prefer to be trying to bite Miryem’s lip back, but Miryem seems genuinely interested. She tries to imagine her mother affectionately calling her that-place “shmundie,” and really can’t imagine how that conversation would have begun in the first place. It was just where she bled, and where babies came from, and then she’d died before Wanda began to bleed. 

Wanda shakes that out of her head. Miryem looks curious, and she’s been hovering on top of Wanda for the whole minute of this ridiculous conversation, and Wanda wants to kiss again, and for Miryem to do whatever mysterious thing she wanted to do with her hands, so she reaches up and takes Miryem by the waist again and says, “Yes, you can touch me, please touch me,” and tilts her face up to be kissed again. 

“Thank you,” Miryem says, and it gives Wanda flutters in her stomach. Then they are _ finally _ kissing again, and Miryem’s hand paints little trails of tingles as she strokes across her collarbones, then breasts, then stomach, and stomach- 

“You’re too tall,” Miryem mutters smushily into Wanda’s lips, and Wanda dearly wishes that the person who knew what she was doing in this situation would simply continue the situation, but then Miryem _ does _ move down her body, and pauses at her breasts again to nibble and lick and drive Wanda out of her mind. Her fingers slip down a few more apparently crucial inches and tangle in the hair between Wanda’s legs, tugging a gasp out of some untapped place in her chest. 

Miryem’s fingers slip between her lips, dragging up, and she bites Wanda’s nipple at the same time, and Wanda has to gasp again, all her muscles tensing at once. “You’re wet,” Miryem tells her, and Wanda’s sure she is, wet like she gets when she rubs on her bunched-up blankets sometimes, but she can’t speak to say anything in response. Miryem slides further down her body. 

“Your hair down here is darker,” she observes, and bends down, resting her chin on Wanda’s lower belly so a few of her thick, massy curls fall onto her thighs and hips. Wanda wrenches her eyes open from where they’ve fallen shut, and yes, the long, straight hair between her legs is darker than the long, straight hair on her head, and Miryem’s hair is still darker, spreading over Wanda’s pale thighs and wandering off into the sheets where her silk dress is crumpling with their movements. Wanda reaches out and pushes her hair away from her face, stroking, and Miryem gives her a cat’s grin that stretches into a smile Wanda would go so far as to call silly. “Knishes are also delicious,” she says. “Do you want to see?” 

Wanda eyes her, suspecting one of Miryem’s sly jokes, but nods with a will. Whatever Miryem means, it’s all been wonderful so far. Then Miryem is wrapping her arms around Wanda’s thighs and scooting down, and her _ mouth_. She’s kissing Wanda’s, her _ knish_, she supposes, her mouth is between Wanda’s legs and she’s kissing her there. Her tongue is oddly cool, at first, flickering like a perch in a warm summer stream, and then Wanda hardly notices the temperature because Miryem’s tongue and lips and nose are exploring her, touching on parts of herself she supposes she knew she had but never made friends with. Who knew those petals of inner flesh that Miryem sucks on would yank a noise from her without conscious thought, that the deep valley between them would be a little still island in the buzz of sensation all around, that the left side of everything would send shocks through her while the right would wind things tighter and tighter without sparking? Wanda noises again, almost too high to hear, and reaches down to grab Miryem’s hands where they are pressing her hips into the ticking. 

“It’s good?” Miryem asks, right into her, lips moving at the very apex of her thighs. She presses long, sucking kisses there, right where the pressure centers when Wanda rubs to release on her wadded-up blankets in the night, Miryem’s empty bed across from her. 

“It’s so good,” she says, voice traveling through at least three pitches on the way. She lets go of Miryem’s hand, works her fingers down to where Miryem’s mouth is, feels her warm breath and the slick of everything, presses where she needs it most. “Here, please, more here.” 

Miryem laughs again --Wanda has never seen her laugh so much-- and flicks out her tongue. Wanda twitches. “Right here?” she asks, and she’s _ teasing_, why would she tease when Wanda is out of her _ mind_? “It’s like a little pearl, Wanda, a little bud, a royzenknosp.” 

“Why do you need to _ name _ everything?” Wanda asks, because she is dying, she really is. Miryem’s hair is still spread out across her thighs like clouds over the moon. Wanda could get it wet, clump it together with herself; it’s killing her. She wants Miryem’s mouth back. 

“So that I can ask you things like, ‘Can I kiss you on your knosp, Wandeleh, until you come?’” She drops a kiss that’s mostly air, and Wanda presses her head back into the pillow. “Can I?” 

“Yes,” Wanda grits out, and when Miryem drops her mouth again she forgets why she ever thought it felt cold; she thinks she’s burning up, turning into another fire demon. She pushes her hips up into Miryem’s face, thinks she must be rude, forgets to think at all. Everything feels tight and hot and golden. She is aware of each little movement of Miryem’s mouth, and aware of the cool air against her breasts, and of the rustling of the grass in the pallet, and how incredibly good and new it all feels. 

“Miryem,” she says, some interminable time later. Miryem lifts up her head, and Wanda almost can’t stand the way her lips look, red as a forest strawberry, glossy and sheened with her own spit and what must be Wanda herself. “Wait,” she says, because she has to squeeze her eyes shut against that. “I want to be kissing you,” she says, and can’t believe she’s become someone who says things like that, to Miryem. 

When she opens her eyes again, Miryem is smiling at her from between her legs. “Of course,” she says, and clambers over Wanda’s legs. She sits down on Wanda’s other side, nearer the wall. For the first time, she looks somewhat uncertain, and she does what Miryem does when uncertain, which is to toss her hair back and ask questions first. “What do you want to do?” 

“Can I just--” Wanda reaches out towards her. 

“Yes, just ask,” Miryem says, and, just like her, takes the initiative, settling herself back on the pillow and holding her arms out. Wanda gets up on her knees to take her in. All Miryem’s softness spread out on the blankets in the dim light piercing through the winter shutters is the most gorgeous thing she’s ever seen. She looks like being warm, and having enough to eat, and like a door that can lock but is open anyway. Her mouth is still wet. 

Wanda feels herself looming a little, feels the length of her compared to Miryem. It’s pleasant, somehow. She wants to wrap herself around Miryem like a fur sleigh rug and bury her nose in her hair. Deliberately, she places her hands on either side of Miryem’s shoulders, swings her leg over Miryem’s hips, and hovers. She can hold Miryem under her body like this, can keep her safe and warm, be a good roof and thick walls. She leans down to kiss her. 

She tastes more than slightly salty now. Wanda supposes it might be strange to be licking herself off Miryem’s lips, but Miryem’s eyes are tightly shut and she squirms, shoulders knocking against Wanda’s wrists. Clearly, if she thinks it’s strange, she doesn’t mind. It tastes like poppy seeds, almost, or rather the poppy filling she and her brothers had eaten with Panova Mandelstam’s parents in the city during the festival of lots. Not really, but in the way that it’s dusty and sharp at once, and strangely bitter, and not immediately pleasant but rather the kind of thing that coats the tongue and nose and keeps one returning for another, another. Does Miryem taste like her? 

She drops down to her forearms and lowers her hips. Some other time --there’s a whole winter ahead-- she will ask, but with the golden tension in her belly and the throbbing between her legs she can’t _ think _ straight. 

The hair between Miryem’s legs is as dark and thick and curly as that on her head, and it trails a little onto the insides of her thighs, barely scratchy over delectable softness. It shades into long, straight hairs as it marches down her legs, and fades into nothingness at the tops of her thighs. Wanda settles over these, feeling presumptuous and awed and also like she can’t feel anything but the roaring in her ears and the quiet, quiet room filled with their quick breathing. She keeps kissing Miryem. Her hips rock a little, almost involuntary. Miryem is so soft. 

Miryem’s lips curve against hers a bit, and she somehow wiggles a thigh in between Wanda’s, pulls her hips down against it. It is firm beneath the give, and satiny soft and prickly at once, and Wanda’s hips kick again, and Miryem pulls on her hips again, and suddenly they have something like a rhythm. Wanda squeezes her legs together to hold Miryem in place, drops her head into Miryem’s dark drifts of hair and rocks, and rocks. Quiet though she is when alone on her bed in the nighttime, she hears herself making tiny noises through her nose. Everything smells like Miryem. Her hair is in her mouth. Wanda sinks into her broad hips and plush belly with each push. She’s caging Miryem in and being caged, as Miryem wraps her arms around her shoulders and runs her hands soothingly up and down her spine. 

She rocks faster. Once again, her whole body is drawing up tight, everything between her sternum and her knees swirling and hot. It’s so good, and not what she’s used to. It’s so good, and Miryem has begun rocking her hips too, which sends a rush of pride through her, but whenever Miryem tries to helpfully press her leg into her, the angle goes wrong, the pressure tilting away from where it’s best.

“I can’t,” she pants, feeling stupid and desperate enough to ignore it. “I just-- It’s not like I know how.” 

“How do you do it?” Miryem asks, and Wanda is a little gratified that she is out of breath too, and still clutching at her arms and shoulders. 

“Like this,” she says, and surely she was flushed enough already for the added blush not to show, “But with blankets, rucked up.” Miryem nods, squirming again. Wanda begins to free an arm from where she’s holding Miryem, but Miryem’s already done what she needs, like always, and she drags a bunch of cloth over her thigh, tucking it into the close space between their limbs. 

“Here, like this,” she says, “Go on, go on.” 

There’s no need to say it a third time. Wanda flails a bit, frees her arm, hunts for Miryem’s hand before she can put it around her shoulders again. She tangles their fingers together, reburies her face in Miryem’s hair, and rubs against the smooth cloth over Miryem’s thigh again, and again, until her hips jolt forward of their own accord, pressing as her body flashes hot and bright and the quiet sounds of the bedroom rush loud in her ears. 

Miryem holds her hand through it. She brings it up to her mouth and kisses each knuckle while Wanda gasps into her ear. She holds still while Wanda clings in the after, until she can pick up her head and tilt their brows together. 

Miryem’s pupils have eaten up her irises, and her color is high, though her complexion doesn’t flush blossom pink like Wanda’s. “Are you well?” 

“I’m well,” Wanda says. “Are you? Did-- can I do the same for you?” She wants to see what Miryem looks like, wants to stay up here on top of her and feel it when Miryem goes to the same place she took Wanda. She wants to be the one to make it happen. 

Miryem gives her a grin, her business grin, although the effect is altogether different combined with her hair sprawling across the pillow and the flush of her cheeks. 

“Let’s see,” she says. “Let me show you.” She guides their still-joined hands down between her legs, stopping when Wanda’s hip blocks their way. Wanda loosens her hand from her grasp to brace herself and move, but stops when the back of her palm touches something water-cool and slippery. 

Miryem’s blue silk dress is creased and dampened to ruin between their tangle of legs. Wanda can see the soaked patches where she rubbed against Miryem’s thigh through it, and where her body pressed it into Miryem’s. It probably will never be wearable again. She looks up at Miryem, horrified. 

“Your dress,” she says. 

“My dress,” Miryem replies. She reaches down and tugs the fabric out from between them. It looks like she is holding the sky in her hands. She pulls it up to her face and takes a great open-mouthed breath. “That was worth a hundred of them.” 

She seems to mean it. Wanda still cannot countenance the fact that she had-- that she had been _ wet _ all over a king’s ransom. Miryem tosses the gown to the foot of the bed. 

“Don’t I know what things are worth?”

She always has. “You always have.” 

“It’s nothing some magic can’t solve, anyway,” Miryem says, and perhaps Wanda can believe that better. “Wanda, do you still…?” 

She still. Something about the way Miryem had simply shoved her fairymade, priceless clothing into the hot space between them and deemed it worth it in her steady, high-handed manner sends new prickles down Wanda’s spine. She likes that Miryem would ruin dresses for her. 

“Yes,” she says. “I do. I’ll make it worth a thousand. Show me?” 

Miryem grins, a proper wide grin, not queenly or magisterial at all, the kind of grin someone who makes ridiculous jokes about knishes makes, and pushes at Wanda’s shoulder until she rolls over onto her side, still curved around Miryem like the crescent moon. Wanda can rest her chin on the crown of her head and look down her lovely, small body, and still reach down to where Miryem is running her fingers through her own curly triangle of hair. Even in the dimness, Wanda can see the shine where wetness has caught in the coils of hair like dew. 

“This is how I do it when I’m alone,” says Miryem. “Watch me.” 

Wanda presses her lips into Miryem’s hair and watches like a hawk. When she rubs on her blankets, it is impossible to be subtle, so she has only done it when alone, in rare moments as a young person. More frequently since coming to this house in the forest with its room for two daughters, its empty bed a pace away from hers. Miryem’s wrist moves in quick little circles, like she’s working a drop spindle, two or three fingers rubbing the side of her knosp, silent. She might have done this every night for a year and no one would have known. Wanda can feel it, though. The faint vibrations in the bed when Miryem flexes her hips into her hand. How her breath comes quickly, still silently, through her nose. The way her arms stiffen and her stomach tenses and her legs press into the bedding, toes digging in. Miryem turns her face into Wanda’s neck and lips at the skin of her throat, not kissing, just seeking contact. Wanda loops her arm behind Miryem’s neck and moves closer, covering her body as much as she can without disturbing that circling hand. She wants to look everywhere at once, and touch everywhere at once, and get between Miryem’s legs to see if they taste the same. 

“Let me,” she says, entranced. 

Miryem takes her hand yet again, and pulls it down between her legs. Her fingers slip a little on Wanda’s wrist. “Do just what I was doing,” she says. 

She’s so hot between her legs, and wetter even than Wanda thinks she was. Wanda wants to be helpful, make those tight little circles just right, but there is just so much texture. The slickness over smooth skin inside and coarse hair outside, the firmness and little ridges of her knosp, the malleability of her inner lips. Wanda runs her fingers over and between Miryem’s folds, then cups her completely like a warm summer peach, utterly fascinated. 

Miryem huffs a little. “Please,” she says. “Explore next time; help me now.” Impatiently, she tugs Wanda’s hand farther down. Wanda can feel that she’s wetter there, knows this must be the entrance to her body, and pangs with heat. 

“Do you want me inside?” she asks, riven with wanting. 

“_Yes_,” Miryem hisses, sounding on the end of her rope, so Wanda takes a deep breath and pushes one finger against the little depression Miryem guided her too. 

Miryem’s body yields for her like an apricot so ripe Wanda can split it and pit it with her bare hands. 

“God,” she says, and Miryem makes a little high songbird noise in response, working her hand again, hips rising and breasts heaving. Wanda leans over her to take the tip of one in her mouth again, and feels Miryem squeeze around her finger. Feeling brave, she brings up another finger to hover near the first, and Miryem gasps, “_Yes_,” again, so Wanda slides it in. 

Miryem’s wrist circles faster, and she starts pushing her hips into Wanda’s hand. Hardly believing her daring, Wanda moves her fingers against the resistance of her inside muscles, listening to Miryem begin to pant audibly. She feels like silk. Wanda keeps stroking, wondering if she can feel her callouses and the small bones of her hand. 

The feel of Miryem around her fingers and pressed full-length against her body is so mesmerizing Wanda is almost startled when Miryem’s breath catches and her hips arch up and stay there. She clenches down on Wanda’s hand, rippling, the movement of her hand going jerky and staccato. 

“God,” Wanda says again, because she finds she simply cannot say anything else, and she doubts Miryem could hear her, in any case. She feels like she’s just been swallowed whole by a whale, that kind of helplessness and sense of enormity, like this bed and bedroom and woman have suddenly become the bounds of her entire world. She lets her elbow untense and rests her head on Miryem’s chest above her breasts, listening to her heart gallop in time to the pulse around her fingers. 

Into her newfound sense of small immensity, Miryem starts to laugh. 

“Come here, come up here,” she says, still out of breath, and Wanda raises her head, knowing she must be doe-eyed and silly-faced. 

“Oh, you’re all verklempt,” Miryem says, all her Miryem smugness flooding back in. She takes Wanda’s face in her hands and kisses her on the forehead, and both cheeks. “Are you all right? Did you have fun?” 

Wanda can only nod and nuzzle against Miryem’s face a bit. Miryem makes a cooing noise that Wanda would never have imagined her capable of, sounding rather like a brooding hen. It breaks the spell, somehow, and then Wanda feels the giggles rising up like the bubbles in new zoyerkroyt. 

“My hand is cramping,” she gets out between laughter, and Miryem scrunches up her nose as she carefully draws her fingers out. Her fingertips have begun to prune a little, and when she shows Miryem they both laugh harder. 

Miryem drags her dress up the bed with her heel and tries to pass it Wanda to clean her hands with. “You said it would be worth a thousand of them,” she says, when Wanda gives her a scandalized look. She supposes Miryem’s right, but she does toss the dress all the way over to her own bed when she’s done in a probably futile effort to save it more degradation.

They lie together in the early winter afternoon silence for a while. Wanda watches the narrow bar of crisp bluish Cheshvan sunlight inch across the floor from the high window, and muses that it must be time to put the shutters up, now that the first hard frost has come and brought Miryem with it. The cabbages will be sweet and ready to pick now they’ve felt a little ice, though the beets and turnips can stay to keep growing until the ground freezes. She’s glad Miryem will be here to help with the pickling. Perhaps the Staryk can make himself useful and freeze the last of the nanny goat’s milk solid so it can overwinter too and the boys will have something strong to drink. There will be _ food _ this winter. 

“Is there a special blessing for magic food?” she wonders aloud. 

Miryem laughs a little. “Do you know, I never thought about it. If so, I’m remiss.”

Wanda runs her hand up the curve of Miryem’s hip. “Is there a blessing for what we just did?” 

“There isn’t,” Miryem replies, after a thoughtful pause. “Most things that happen between two people don’t have one, like giving charity or visiting a new bride. But I feel like there should be.” 

She rolls over to her side, propping herself up on her forearm. Wanda reaches up to play with her hair. “I hadn’t done that before,” she says. “Nothing like it. We could say the blessing for firsts, if you wanted to.” 

Miryem smiles down at her, and reaches down to cradle her head. “Baruch asoh Adonoi,” she begins, and Wanda closes her eyes and feels as safe as houses, saying the words she learned from Panova Mandelstam just months ago. 

When they finish, Miryem presses a kiss to her forehead. “Will you show me the farm?” she asks. “I’ve barely seen it yet.” 

Wanda feels her face crack into one of her new smiles, the ones that come from enough food, and a room with two beds, and broadcloth clothing, and the promise of an immersion in the stream when spring comes and the water is warm enough. She will show Miryem the brown-and-white nanny goat, and the ruddy beet greens in their field, and the walnut near the outhouse. They will run into Panov Mandelstam in one of the vegetable patches, and he will give them both a kiss on the forehead, and they might meet Sergey mending the fence he hopes will keep the coming snow from drifting into the kitchen. 

She won’t take Miryem to see the slender white tree by the stream today. Today is a day for Miryem to be cosseted by her parents, and to get to know Wanda’s brothers, and to maybe start stringing up the apples to dry before the light goes. Panova Mandelstam is making lokshen kugel with some of their precious wheat flour to surprise Miryem with, so dinner will be a treat and probably last into the night. Tomorrow, though, if they can spare a stretch in the afternoon, Wanda will take her. They will sit under the tree and Wanda can know all her family is in one place, safe. 

“Of course,” she says, disentangling herself from the bed, thinking also of nights spent sharing one or the other, learning more ways to please each other. “I can show you all of it. Let me find you a jacket.” 

  
  


❦


End file.
